


Sashimi

by Pragnificent (PragmaticHominid)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Hannibal Lecter is a Cannibal, Magical Realism, MerMay, MerMay 2018, Merman Will Graham
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 00:46:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14682975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/Pragnificent
Summary: Hannibal spots the merman in the back corner of the shop, languishing in an undersized galvanized steel tank.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FlyingRotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlyingRotten/gifts).



> The fic below is inspired by [this](http://camilleflyingrotten.tumblr.com/post/173900801541/hannibal-is-planning-to-serve-sashimis-for-dinner) fantastically haunting painting made by FlyingRotten.  

Hannibal spots the merman in the back corner of the shop, languishing in an undersized galvanized steel tank.

He tilts his head curiously when the creature meets his eyes, and then Hannibal strides towards it, passing pens and cages containing smaller wonders as he does so. Insectile fairies buzz with fury from behind the glass of their tanks as he goes by, and in their wire enclosure a small herd of jackalopes raise their twitchy noises upward to scent him suspiciously. Hannibal’s hand falls casually on the forehead of a unicorn foal as it stretches out its neck as far as its pen will allow to nuzzle him, and he feels the stub of its budding horn, but he does not stop to tarry with the animal.  

Insofar as the other beasts and creatures in the shop are unhappy, they have come to feel that way because they are wild things which are accustomed to avoiding humans, or because their enclosures are too small or otherwise inadequate, or because the smell of the blood of their peers, which hangs heavy in the air, incites a certain degree of instinctual anxiety.

The merman, though… he knows exactly why he is here, and he understands what is to become of him, and the helpless terror of that knowledge has dilated his pupils to pinpricks, the black depths of which seem infinite. Crouching down to the merman’s level, Hannibal swims in the depths of that wretched, agonized dread, inhaling the scent of his fear from among the mystical zoo smell of the basement-level exotic meats shop, and finds something else lurking beneath it all.    

The tank that they have the merman in is far too small, and his tail flops over the edge in a way that strikes Hannibal as being acutely uncomfortable. His scales are an iridescent array of blues and greens, but where they have been left out of the water they are dry and flaking and dull. He clutches a wet old blanket over his shoulders as though it might offer him some sort of protection, and his knuckles are white from how tightly he grips the tattered cloth. The heavy metal collar around his neck is sealed with a padlock, and the short chain that extends from it is bolted to a fixture on the wall. Dark ringlets of damp hair frame a face that is strikingly beautiful.   

The man behind the counter mistakes Hannibal’s interest in the creature as pity, and has a chuckle at Hannibal’s expense. “He might look harmless, buddy, but that one's a man-eater,” the butcher warns.

“Siren,” Hannibal says, without looking away from the creature. The merman has not broken eye contact with him since Hannibal first looked his way, but his terror has only grown from what he sees in his eyes. He trembles.

“That’s right,” the butcher says. Hannibal can hear the man going through the motions of wrapping his order in butcher’s paper. “Unusual to find one of those - so much rarer to take one alive.”

“Why doesn’t he sing now?” Hannibal asks. He has, of course, worked that out for himself, but he often finds it beneficial to feign a certain degree of naivety in such matters.      

“Its tongue’s been taken out.”

“Ah,” Hannibal says, and then pauses speculatively. “Is it available?”

“Already sold.”

“A pity,” Hannibal says, with real disappointment. He straightens to his full height, but does not look away from the merman. “I’d like to make an alteration to my order, if you please. I think I’ll serve sashimi tonight instead.”

The siren swallows painfully and turns his eyes away from Hannibal. The shaking has become considerably more severe.

There follows a brief negotiation on the question of the price, per ounce, for a high quality cut taken from the tail. “Four pounds, then,” Hannibal says, settling on a price that might have bankrupted a man of lesser means. “I would like to watch you harvest the meat.”

This is not, Hannibal knows from experience, an unusual request; given the expense of the items offered at this particular specialty shop, patrons often demand that their purchases be slaughtered and butchered in front of them, to guarantee that meat is fresh and has not been replaced by a cheaper substitution.  

The man has hair the color of spoiled cream, and now he brushes it out of his eyes with the back of a heavily muscled forearm. “It’s always the big spenders who are so worried about being cheated,” he gripes, but good naturedly, and takes the heavy club down from its hook on the wall.

Hannibal blinks at that. “You haven’t a bolt gun?”

The man smiles down at Hannibal from a considerably greater height. “More of a show this way.”

“Inhumane.”

Hannibal says the single word flatly, with no inflection.

The butcher sizes Hannibal up, then visibly decides that it is safe to dismiss him. “I can find another buyer,” he tells Hannibal, all good humor gone now. “No problem.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Hannibal says graciously, and steps to the side as the butcher strides past him.

In a way, Hannibal thinks that the merman’s fear is less now that he can see that the matter is nearing its end. He is staring at Hannibal again now, almost as though he considers the butcher to be beneath his notice, and the lines of his face are hard with bitter resignation.

Hannibal has seen a similar reaction to imminent death on the faces of a few of the people he has killed, but only very rarely. Only among the extremely brave. He smiles at the siren to show how pleased he is with him, and sees something - hope? - flickering in the creature’s eyes.

When the butcher raises his club, Hannibal steps up behind him and drawing the folding knife from his pocket opens it in one smooth gesture and runs the blade across his throat.

Before the man can fall, Hannibal catches him by the back of his shirt to keep him on his feet; there’s some fight in the man still, and Hannibal does not wish for him to attract the attention of the security guards that are watching the door upstairs by thrashing around or knocking things over. He holds on despite the butcher’s desperate efforts to shake him off, and when he abandons his attempts to knock Hannibal away with his fist and instead presses the open palm of his hand against his bleeding neck to try to stem the flow, Hannibal catches his wrist and wretches it away from the gash, pinning it behind his back instead.

When the blood begins to shower down over him, the siren opens his mouth in the purest joy that Hannibal has ever had the pleasure to witness, as though he is welcoming the coming of rain after a nearly deadly drought, and Hannibal sees that the inside of his mouth is lined with row after row of needle-sharp teeth.  

The butcher is nearly still now. Hannibal lets him slide to the floor, then bends to retrieve his knife from where he dropped it. He is not quite dead when Hannibal crouches over him and cuts out his tongue.

Hannibal flicks blood from his fingertips and then carries the tongue to the counter to make a parcel. “We’ll eat this together,” he tells the siren, and for a long moment the creature simply blinks at him, dumbfounded, but then he nods his assent.

Placing the brown paper-wrapped package in his jacket pocket, Hannibal finds the key ring hanging from a peg behind the counter.

When he unlocks the collar from around the siren’s neck, he grabs Hannibal’s wrist in his own hands and clings, his eyes a colorful riot of emotion - relief and gratitude and vicious satisfaction at the death of the butcher - but he is evaluating Hannibal too, making a decision about whether or not to trust him, and Hannibal suspects that if those teeth close over his hand they will shred it beyond all repair in the blink of an eye.

But when the merman brings Hannibal’s hand to his lips it is to rain kisses onto it, and Hannibal is curious about what it will feel like to kiss him on the mouth, with all those teeth but only the stub of his ruined tongue; that he will learn the answer to this question already feels inevitable. 

Still holding onto Hannibal’s wrist, the siren lifts Hannibal’s hand and rest it on the crown of his head, in among the tangle of damp curls. Following the bidding of some impulse he hardly understands, Hannibal bows his own head and allows the merman to bury his fingers in his hair.

 _I'm under his sway,_ Hannibal thinks. _He didn't need to sing to capture me._ The idea does not trouble him. He is sure that he can break free, should he wish to do so.

After a little while, Hannibal straightens and backs away. The siren’s eyes fall on the butcher, staring at the body with naked longing.

Hunger knows hunger, and Hannibal drags the body closer to the tank before telling him, “Just don't ruin your appetite.

“I’ll be back in just a few minutes,” he adds, and heads upstairs to deal with the guards.

Hannibal is not sure, exactly, how he is going to get the siren out of the basement and safely back to his own home without attracting undue attention, and he has even less of an idea about what to do with him when they get there, though he is beginning to consider the possibility of setting up an above ground pool in the basement as a short-term solution, but as he listens to the siren tear into the dead butcher, Hannibal is confident that the future will see to itself. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooops it's chapter fic now. <333

The siren allows the man to lift him into his arms and carry him into his home and up the stairs. 

Big patches of his scales are already cracked and raw, and hurts to be touched in the way that the man is touching him, though he sloshed water over his hands and arms before he picked the siren up, but there are things about the experience that he enjoys. 

He likes being touched, even in the places where that touching provokes a sharp ache, and he likes the feel of strong arms curled around his body, and best of all he likes the implicit trust that the man seems to show in carrying him like this, with his mouth so close to the underside of the man’s throat. 

The siren has never been inside a human’s home before, though he has in the past explored sunken ships, and most of what he knows about the rooms that they pass through and the objects found within them is drawn from inference. He knows, for example, what the bed is for, and when they go past it and into the bathroom it seems obvious at glance that the Jacuzzi tub is meant to be filled with water, though it is empty when the man lowers him into it. 

Propping himself up on his elbows to look up at the man, the siren flicks the tip of his tail and pouts angrily, doing his best to induce him to correct this situation. 

The man stoops and turns two knobs at the front of the tub, and water comes roaring out through a fixture. “You can control the temperature yourself here,” the man explains, and lifts the siren’s hand to bring it under the flow as he demonstrates how one of the knobs makes the water colder while the second makes it hotter. It’s freshwater, deeply uncomfortable against his scales and almost entirely lacking in scent - water devoid of life - but it’s better than nothing and a sincere improvement over his more recent accommodations, and he makes the water as warm as a tide pool heated by the midday sun and ducks his head under the flow. 

He can feel the man’s eyes on him, and knows that he is beautiful to him, so the siren primps and poses for him, using both hands to push the hair out of his eyes, the water slicking it back, and then turns languidly onto his back so he can smile up at the man with a coy little smile. 

The man is good at hiding his distraction. “I’ve some natural sea salt in the kitchen,” he says. “A moment.”

While the man is gone, the siren looks around the room. The space is full of orate objects, more elaborate beauty than he has ever seen enclosed in such a small space, and the siren drinks it all in with covetous eyes, wanting to touch and hold and possess everything. 

The salt the man gives him, when he returns, is as dead as the water, but the siren takes it grateful and upends the container over the water. The man stops him before much of the salt can spill into the water, lifting the container from his hands with graceful speed. 

“Mix it in slowly,” he says. “Let it dilute and defuse until you’ve had some time to gauge your comfort level. If the salinity is too high it may burn you.”

He does what the man tells him, sloshing the water around with his arms to spread the salt. The tub is almost full now, just deep enough for him to submerge himself. He can swim an extremely tight loop in the space, and he does that now, rolling in the shallow water, feeling almost free in his body for the first time in more days than he can count. 

It pleases the man, seeing him happy, and that pleasure is contagious. “An improvement, isn’t it? Not ideal, but I’ll put together better accommodations as soon as possible.”

The siren breaches from the water and wraps his arms around the back of the man’s neck, pulling him down to his own level. He presses their foreheads together and holds the man there, skin on skin, at his mercy. 

When the siren moves to kiss him the man tries to draw back - suspicious or fearful or just shy, the siren isn’t sure, and though he does not doubt that he could compel the man to accept his kiss gladly, the idea of forcing him to do so is oddly disquieting. 

When he lets the man go, he takes a few quick steps backwards, putting space between himself and the siren, but regains his poise quickly. 

“You understand English?” the man asks, a little stiffly, and the siren nods in affirmation, though that’s not exactly correct. 

I understand desire, he would say, if he could speak. You could speak any of a thousand human tongues or none at all, and I would understand _to_ _be understood_ is your greatest desire. 

He understands, perfectly well, how dangerous some of the things the man desires are; the idea of eating him was not entirely a ploy to distract the butcher, and the man has not entirely abandoned the idea. 

Nonetheless, the siren feels safer than he has in a long while.  

“Have you a name?” the man asks. “Mine is Hannibal.” 

The siren smiles sadly and shrugs; he does, of course, but he’s lost the ability to speak it, and doubts that it would have ever fit inside a human mouth even if he could. 

“Would you object to being called Will?”

The siren hears the sounds that make up the word, but it is the emotional associations that come with the word that matter the most to him.  _ Force of will, _ floats closely to the top of Hannibal’s consciousness, his slight unease at not knowing how much of the events that brought the two of them here were directed by the siren, as well as how much control he may come to exercise over Hannibal. 

_ Willful, _ beneath that. Stubborn and brave, and unlikely to be easily bent to Hannibal’s own will, though the prospect of trying to make him pleases Hannibal to some degree. 

Closer to his secret heart, the desires that Hannibal hides even from himself, a question:  _ Willing? _ Willing to see him, to know him and accept him as he is?

_ Will, _ the siren mouths silently, the stump of his stolen tongue aching at the movement, and when he makes his face soft with pleasure and his smile broad he sees the expression mirrored back at him on Hannibal’s face. 


End file.
